Page 55 of Forbidden Protector

This is my house. My land under it, my name on the deed, and my father's father's before that. She's standing over my desk in the middle of it like she's forgotten whose ground she's standing on.

Some ugly, satisfied part of me is glad to remind her.

"You were supposed to be at the Riverview by now."

"I was on my way to say goodbye." Her eyes haven't left the page. "You were asleep. I wasn't going to wake you. Then I saw whose name that was."

"I fell asleep working the county archive. Wasn't a message. Wasn't an invitation either."

"I believe you. You look like a man who lost a fight with his own desk." She sets her hand flat on the folder, like she's deciding whether to admit the rest of it. "But it's still open, and it's still his name."

"You could've taken it and gone. Photographed every page and been thirty miles south before I woke up."

"I thought about it." A pause. "Then I decided I'd rather ask you to your face."

"Then ask. Quit circling it like I'm going to bite."

"Where'd you find the boxes? The county archive?"

"Why exactly are you still here? You told me you wanted your own door. One you could lock that wasn't mine. Now I find you standing over my fucking desk."

"Nice try on the deflection. Where you found the boxes is the only question that matters. Everything after it is detail."

She doesn't look up from the page. Her voice has gone flat and controlled, the register she used on Gideon in that study the first week. I understand in that half second that whatever's about to happen in this room, I am not going to be Holt to her while it does.

"You've had this since when?"

"Last night." I get it out through a jaw locked so tight my molars grind on it.

"You've had my grandfather's murder in that safe since last night and didn't say a word to me?"

"I fell asleep. That's the whole apology you're getting."

"That's not the point and you know it's not." The field notebook's in her other hand now, the soft cardboard one, and I recognize the handwriting on the cover. Older, careful, the kind of hand that learned to write before ballpoints got cheap.

"I've had this since I was fifteen years old, Blackwater. My father kept it in a desk drawer his whole life and then I kept it in a box in my garage, and the last thing my grandfather ever wrote down was that your family knew something and buried it, the same way they buried men in nineteen forty-one." Her jaw sets. "Three days later he was dead on that mountain and the county ruled it exposure. Same tidy word for the same ugly thing. I've spent my whole life being the only person left who thought that mattered."

"I didn't know."

Something's climbing up the back of my throat that isn't grief and isn't guilt. Some third thing with teeth. I put it down the way I'd put down a shot I didn't want to take yet. Not here. Not at her.

"You didn't know your family had a body in the ground with my name attached to it? Sure you didn't."

"I didn't know until last night." I make myself say it slow, because slow is the only register I trust myself in right now. "I found a survey request. Denied. Nineteen eighty-seven. A witness statement nobody typed clean. His name's on both."

"And you sat on it."

"I sat with it. One night. Wasn't going to hand you something like that half-cocked."

"Don't." The word clears her like a blade coming out of its sheath. "Don't you dare make this about how gently you were going to break it to me. You don't get credit for a night of silence just because you were planning to be careful with it eventually."

She's right, and I don't say so. Saying so right now would sound like a man trying to win an argument instead of a man standing in the wreckage of one. I'm not fool enough to confuse the two today.

"Three days," she says again, quieter now, worse for it. "He goes up that mountain to survey a section line nobody wanted surveyed, and three days later he's dead in the snow, and the man who talked to him last, whose name is on the coroner's supplement, shares your last name."

She sets the notebook down on the folder like she's laying two bodies side by side. "So you'll forgive me if a week of your family's hospitality reads a little differently from where I'm standing."

"Say what you actually mean. Just fucking spit it out."